feudalism
IPA: fjˈudʌɫɪzʌm
noun
- A social system based on personal ownership of resources and personal fealty between a suzerain (lord) and a vassal (subject). Defining characteristics are direct ownership of resources, personal loyalty, and a hierarchical social structure reinforced by religion.
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Examples of "feudalism" in Sentences
- This would seem to imply a move toward feudalism, which is probably one likely outcome.
- Regarded as a relic of that great institution know as feudalism, M. d'Espard deserved respectful admiration.
- -- His leading object is the suppression of feudalism, that is to say, of the great families and old historic authorities.
- America has no roots in feudalism, no notion of inherited orders of society, no instinct for deference or regard for nobility.
- However this organization might outwardly resemble what we are accustomed to call feudalism, its structure was rather like that of ancient Egyptian or Peruvian society, -- minus the priestly hierarchy.
- China's first real social crisis after the collapse of feudalism, that is to say, after the fourth or third century B.C., began only in the present century with the collapse of the social order of the gentry and the breakdown of the family system.
- And when at a later period civil society was gradually organising itself on that hierarchical model which we know as feudalism, the Church, in the persons of its officers, was tending to become not so much the counterpart of the State as an integral part of it.
- The pressures of Muslim, Magyar, and Viking invasions, combined with the civil wars among Charlemagne's descendants who could do little to halt those invasions, accelerated the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire and hastened the development of what modern students call feudalism and manorialism.
- Put more precisely — for the word feudalism has been used to describe many different forms of social relations — this transition was one from what the French call a 'société d'ordres' and the Germans a 'Standegesellschaft' to the kind of society that became the predominant type in Europe in the nineteenth century and is usually described as capitalist or bourgeois.
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